IRAQ: People here say they would rather have war than live another day beneath the Iraqi dictator's veil of terror. Lynne O'Donnell reports from a non-state in northern Iraq that calls itself the Land of the Kurds.
Holy day in Iraqi Kurdistan begins with a dawn crescendo as the call to prayer of countless muezzins reverberates across the fertile valley of an ancient, marginalised and long-suffering people.
In Irbil, the capital of a non-state that calls itself the Land of the Kurds, yesterday's 4.50 a.m. cacophony signalled the start of a day in what the people of this region are now daring to believe is a new era.
Anticipation of war and the natural fear of horrors to come is tinged with a reluctant hope that soon - though not soon enough - Saddam Hussein will recede into memory, to become a bogey-man invoked only to make children eat their vegetables.
The scars of decades of suffering are deeply gouged across northern Iraq, where about five million Kurds cower in certainty that once a war on President Saddam begins, their suffering will be renewed.
Over the past 12 years, they have had time to get used to freedoms that are protected by the United Nations, by British and American jet fighters, and billions of dollars in international aid.
Split into east and west sectors controlled respectively by the Kurdish Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the Kurdish, Arab, Turkmen and Assyrian people of northern Iraq have built themselves an autonomous zone with a semblance of democracy and thriving civil society.
Schools, hospitals, supermarkets, restaurants, hotels, theatres and internet cafes line the rutted streets. Satellite dishes adorn the flat roofs of many homes, testimony to the freedom people here enjoy to have access to information, form their own opinions and express themselves.
Many women, but not all, don the traditional black garb of Islamic piety. Irbil bars are more prolific than mosques for this secularising and modernising population.
But their peace has been built in Saddam's shadow.
War-weary and yearning for normality, people here say they would rather have another war, and risk the retaliation they are certain will come once the American-led campaign to rid Iraq and the world of Saddam is launched, than live another day beneath his veil of terror.
"There is no person in Iraq who has not suffered from Saddam. It is terrible, every Iraqi has a story, every Iraqi has suffered," said Khiiairy Anwar. "The most bad person in the world is Saddam."
A former soldier in Saddam's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, Mr Anwar reels off a list of the Iraqi dictator's crimes to prove his point.
Standing in the lee of what is known as Saddam's Bridge, which marks the line between freedom and fear half-an-hour's drive north of Irbil, he begins with gassings, bombings, forced relocations and disappearances, moves through murder, mass graves and corruption and ends with gruelling poverty and joblessness.
Behind him, beyond the snaking line of cars and trucks waiting to cross into the Saddam-free zone of the north, the frontlines of the Ba'athist forces are dug in. Atop the nearby hills, military sentry boxes overlook the busy border point, which is patrolled on its southern end by peshmerga, militiamen of the Kurdish Democratic Party that controls this eastern sector of Iraqi Kurdistan.
Dressed in battle fatigues, with Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders and traditional red- or black-chequered scarves wrapped around their heads, the peshmerga peer through car windows, open trunks and check bags, alert for suicide bombers like the one on Thursday that killed three people at a checkpoint in a nearby town.
In the past week, as the beat against Saddam has grown louder and local leaders have met to discuss the future of an Iraq without him, a barely suppressed excitement that change could, finally, be at hand expresses itself in waves and smiles from militiamen, schoolboys and housewives alike.
Banners are strung across roads and fly at intersections in Salahuddin, the nearby seat of KDP leader Massoud Bazani, who hosted the three-day meeting of Iraqi opposition groups that closes today, declaring a Free Iraq and No To Saddam.
The presence of President Bush's personal envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad, his security detail of 60 US Special Forces, as well as hundreds of foreign reporters, is seen as the first wave of a force that will eject Saddam in a swift and irreversible campaign just weeks away.
For Abdal Wahah, who, for the past 10 years, has lived a minute's walk from Saddam's Bridge in the village of Aski Kalak, change cannot come fast enough.
"I feel like we are being watched all the time from those checkpoints," Mr Wahah said as he nodded towards the hilltop boxes. "Once they're no longer there I will feel a huge burden lifted. But for now we depend on God. And then America."
A driver with the local administration, Mr Wahah (37), moved his family to the north after Saddam's goons rampaged through his village and burnt down his house during pogroms against Kurds after the Gulf War. Now he and his wife Hadia (30) and their eight children are preparing to flee once more.
"We will walk to Iran, just like we did in 1991," Mr Wahah said. "It takes a month to walk there, that's the only way we can go. We just take clothes, bread, necessities like that wrapped up in blankets."
Hadia, clutching her youngest, one-year-old Rozan, pulls the beaded edge of her long, black chador over her grey-streaked hair and throws her free hand over her head.
"It's a life," she says. "I'd rather not live this one, I'd rather stay at home but what can we do? We are poor, we have nothing, we live in fear." The core of that fear, people believe, has the scent of fresh fruit - apples, bananas or oranges - and kills in seconds.
Halabja, the blighted city where 5,000 people died in a gas attack in March 1988, typifies Saddam for the 32 children in classroom seven at the Aski Kalak School. "We fear chemical weapons, but America says it will defend Kurdish people, so we aren't afraid," Kurdistan Ageed (13) said.
"We have seen on television what happened in Halabja and of course we are scared. We do think that Saddam will attack us with chemical weapons. But America will defend us," said the tall, olive-skinned girl in a black headscarf as she stood behind her front row desk.
"Saddam wants us to leave the oil alone," Dilshad Abdul (12) said. "We are sure that Saddam will attack us with chemical weapons, just like Halabja," Briwa Ibrahim (12) said.
"Saddam doesn't let us have oil or gas to stay warm during the cold weather," Shewaz Neriman (12) said.
Headmistress Suzan Osman Abraham worries that education will be among the first casualties of a war to remove Saddam's regime. "I have experience of war. We'll have to close all the schools, universities, institutes. There is never any education during a war," Mrs Abraham said.
"But things will be better for these children after the war and Saddam has gone. Right now there are no good prospects for these children. I wish there was, and I hope there will be," she said.
"I think of my own seven children. I want them to grow up in peace, to live well and have a good future. With Saddam, there is no hope for that. But without him, in an Iraq without Saddam, the future will be good for everyone."